


unfolding

by seraphy



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, brief mentions of violence, mentions of doctors/hospitals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:08:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28141401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphy/pseuds/seraphy
Summary: Jack and Gabriel reminisce on their brighter days.
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15
Collections: Reaper76 Free For All Secret Santa 2020





	unfolding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TrashHQ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrashHQ/gifts).



> huge thank you to zavijah for betaing this last minute! please check them out on ao3 <3

_ Decadent sunbeam— _

_ a drop of gold _

_ bleeding through the  blood- and oil-spill. _

The paper crinkled underneath his hand, yellowed and withered with age. He recognized it immediately as Gabriel’s handwriting, knew it by its measured, soft rhythm—and the reckless strikes dashed through the lines. It was hasty and heedless, scratched in a hurry. I’s missed their dots and t’s missed their crosses. 

How old was Gabriel when he wrote this? Twenty-one, twenty-two? His handwriting gradually declined as they aged, stilted and uncertain from tremors, his poems spaced more and more apart—from days to months to years. They were sporadic gifts left in his desk, and Jack had hounded him for every draft, every piece, until Gabriel had assured him he had seen them all; the rest was left to time. 

“I thought you had shown me everything,” Jack said neutrally, with that tone that implied he knew more than he was letting on.

“I did,” Gabriel responded from across the room. His voice echoed, heavy and empty in the ruins of their old home. “. . . Are you seriously mad about this?” 

“No.” 

He couldn’t see, but he knew Gabriel was rolling his eyes. “In Jack Language, no means yes.” 

“You should be fluent by now.”

“I am, and in all three dialects: pissed off, horny, and exhausted.” 

_ I miss when you’d write these,  _ Jack was actually thinking. He did not reply. 

Gabriel stalked over, somehow silently. He heard him coming, even if the shadows cloaked his steps. He snatched it from his hands, looking it over. “This is old, Jack. We weren’t even together.”

“So you remember writing it.” Jack leaned his shoulder against the charred wood. 

“Of course I do. I remember being ridiculously bad at it even after reading and writing poetry since I was a freshman.” 

“When did you write it?”

Gabriel sighed. “In Russia. Or around that time.” 

_ Russia.  _ “During the siege?”

“After that, actually. When we had been evacuated back to the States.” 

Jack went silent, his thoughts dark. That memory was disturbingly clear — at least, the patches of it he could recall. There had been hunger, yes, the nanites buzzing and flitting across his bones, his bloodstream boiling, roiling, revolting against every movement. The street had been leveled, the houses whittled down to mere ghosts of themselves, skeletal echoes of a once vibrant and bustling city. Their rations dwindled, and he remembered their ghostly faces—Ana, the legendary sniper, her eyes dark and dim, Reinhardt, whose blond hair was flattened with grease and matted with blood. They had been holed up in an old church. Jack had gone out for recon. Maybe to scavenge for food, if there was even anything left. 

When you can hear everything, silence is crushingly loud. It swarms you like a burst of crows, an explosion of gunfire, and the sound of your heartbeat swallows the living world. His radio went silent after a cacophony of cybernated screams and distorted struggles, and then—

For lack of a better phrase, his body went dark. 

“Really wish Torbjörn had warned me about what that EMP would have done to our bodies.” Breathing again felt like a struggle. 

Gabriel smiled sadly. His way of warding off tragedy. “They told me your heart might never start again.” 

Jack lowered himself down, leaning against the threshold of their old closet. He grabbed his rifle and began to mechanically disassemble it. It was something he could do with his eyes closed. “It did, though.”

“Because you’re a ruthless bastard who never knows how to stay down.” 

Jack, examining the barrel with a borescope, asked, “You never told me what happened after that. Everything was kind of … dark.” Murky. He tried to wade through those memories, but they were more amalgams of sensations, of colors and shapes—they were hardly coherent. 

“We did what we went there to do. Torbjörn technology became standardized after that. When they realized they could make it smaller and more mobile, that’s when the beginning of the —“

Jack rubbed his face. “I know what the history books say. I meant what  _ you  _ did.” 

Gabriel was silent for a long while, and when he finally spoke, he spoke quietly, quickly, without his usual bravado. “Followed you back to the States, obviously. You were out for months. They were tempted to pull the plug on you, said that even if you did wake up, you’d be … you wouldn’t be the same.” 

Jack stretched. “Turns out I was just taking a really long nap.”

Gabriel shot him a glare. “Yeah, you took your sweet ass time waking up.” 

“It really felt like I was asleep for both five minutes and five years. I dreamt … the entire time, I think. Sometimes it was just a recurring nightmare. Other times … it was nicer. But it was like being trapped within yourself.

“I felt like I had to shake it off. I had things to do. It was like one of those dreams where you  _ know  _ you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up. It wasn’t time.” 

“Sometimes you would respond to things I said. Not out loud, but you would move,” Gabriel said, solemn.

“I could hear your voice, at times.” It was like the light, the scythe through the darkness. It’s what brought him back, he liked to think, as naïve and idealistic as that was. 

Gabriel scoffed. “I hope you didn’t hear anything embarrassing.”

Jack smirked. “I heard all the sappy shit that mattered, Gabe.” Yet his mind was particularly skilled at putting words in Gabriel’s mouth—perhaps because he spent so much time focusing on it, so much time studying it. 

“I said no such sappy shit. I am not a sap.”

“You are a sap. That’s why you kissed me as soon as I woke up.”

Gabriel relented, albeit begrudgingly. “You looked so close to death.”

“More so than usual? I visited death so often back then, he’s probably wondering why I haven’t sent him anything in a couple of years. I must have drained half of the US treasury just to stay alive. I was too damn expensive to simply die.” 

“You got a nice reward for not dying.” 

“An instrument of death,” Jack replied in a mockingly sweet voice, “they really shouldn’t have.” 

Indeed, the rifle he was carrying now had originally been a gift to symbolize the dawn of a new world. Jack was not superstitious, but a symbol of war should  _ not  _ have been the red ribbon that introduced a new epoch, but what did he know?

And yet, as much as he loathed to admit it, it had become an extension of him. It had been precariously built for his hands only, standing at just flush of his hip when upright. It was heavy—for supersoldier hands  _ only. _ At the time, this kind of technology had not been standardized; unsurprisingly, the recruits of the SEP had been the guinea pigs for it. Back then, bullets with jacketed lead were still the norm, an unthinkable concept nowadays. 

“They got it right eventually,” Gabriel leaned on the wall with a macabre laugh, “only after fifteen or so recruits severed their hands with it.” 

“And then they took their gift back,” Jack added dryly. “Because I, to them, died as I lived: government fucking property.”

“Who wouldn’t want the original Strike-Commander’s weapon in their museum?” 

“I’m sure if the conservator looked closely enough, they’d still find my blood on it. At least they deep cleaned it before I ruined all their hard work in my first fight.” 

Gabriel watched him clean from across the room. Everything about Jack was different—from his speech to his gait. It was unhinged, feral. He had scrubbed away the stars on his gun and retrofitted it to his needs, from repainting it to backalley deals for illegal parts. It had been a beacon of hope, the bulwark of his identity. 

It made sense why he scrubbed it clean. Effaced its identity. Its work was never over. 

“Just proof of how damn hard you are to kill. Like a little … cockroach,” Gabriel snorted, rummaging through another bin Jack had carelessly left open before shutting it. 

“You missed this one, champ.” Gabriel tossed another paper to Jack, smirking when it floated right in front of his work.

_ The world opens up in a din of chaos, _

_ save for your laughter— _

_ a bellchime in a field of the dead— _

Jack leaned over to read it, not wanting to touch it with his dirty hands. This one—his handwriting was sloppier. Rushed. Desperation pooled between the lines, suffocated the spaces between words. It was cramped. The date was faint, a footnote.  _ 2063\.  _

He hadn’t noticed Gabriel was peering over his shoulder, too focused on the coldness creeping into his limbs. 

Jack remembered that year. Very vividly. 

“That didn’t stop people from trying, though,” Jack finally added after a while. He placed his hand over his heart, feeling the pain, the bullets carelessly tearing through flesh. 

Prague. Evening. Something had always felt amiss, but he figured it was that lingering vestige of anxiety, coming from a world that was always on edge, always on the verge of collapse. People had begun to suspect something was off about him—his sleeplessness, rebounding after a fatal injury, his insatiable appetite, his strength. 

Of course, Angela had known. Moira had known. All it took was one look and any respectable doctor would know something was amiss. But the rest of the world? He endeavored to keep it a secret. The world was ripe with a form of hatred and bigotry that would make McCarthy blush. What would people think of someone who was both human and omnic? Someone who  _ looked _ human,  _ seemed _ human,  _ acted _ human, but closed the gap between human and artificial? 

The SEP had been classified for a very long time, despite his attempts to expose it. 

_ The US must be held accountable for its war crimes _ , he said. That had been a very unpopular opinion, especially when his own organization was at the whims of an organ wherein the United States had a permanent seat. 

Some lessons you had to be taught the hard way. 

Gabriel, seeing Jack’s face, peered at the date on the bottom. “There was a reason I kept this one from you.”

The scars still stung. 

“I failed you, that day,” Gabriel added quietly. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it. Especially after your. . . controversial remarks.” 

“They failed at killing me,” Jack corrected. 

_ Prague. Evening.  _ He was talking, smiling—death always seemed to arrive at him in small stages, unfolding second by second, like some kind of poisonous flower. 

Gabriel took the paper out of his hands and looked at it. He remembered the exact moment this one was written, too. Under the glaring, exposing heat of the fluorescent lights, the hospital tile that was too bright, too clean, too easy to imagine how blood had been scrubbed away. Hospitals smelled like sickness and death and blood and pain. He crouched over the waiting room chair, long after the din of doctor’s voices had faded, their war cries diminished. Medicine was a battlefield too, he had learned, but the enemy was much more sinister—it was time, it was something too small to crush under his boot. 

He had been awake for five days. Examining the footage. Seeing who it could have been. Following hopeless leads. All while Jack slept soundlessly, suspended between the living and the dead. 

Jack’s face had been very ashen. Gaunt. It looked empty when it was not illuminated by the light within, and he had been terrified that what made Jack  _ Jack _ was already gone. 

“Don’t remind me,” Gabriel grumbled. 

They’d come out to him and said he had been resuscitated after forty-five minutes. He remembered restlessly asking Angela what happens when someone codes, forced her to detail every step, what happens when someone doesn’t wake up. She’d looked at him with exhausted eyes and simply told him to go to bed. 

Jack’s voice took him out of the memory: “It was, what, one attempt out of how many? I feel like I was more of a wanted man back then than I am now.” 

“Except there isn’t a team of doctors at your beck and call if you happen to be fatally shot.” Gabriel’s voice was tense, tight in the way that suggested he was angrier than he let on. “Especially not a team of  _ the best doctors in the world. _ ”

“They all think I’m dead. I’m content to let it stay that way—“ he paused, his arms crossed, “for now.” 

“Ana knows. And Angela.”

“They weren’t supposed to know. It’s much safer that way.” 

“How many countries do you think you’ll have dragged me through by the time you’re through with your revenge scheme?” Gabriel watched Jack stand up, the moonlight limning his form in stark relief. He was slimmer, he noticed—had noticed that right away. Even with his armor and jacket on, it looked like someone had taken Jack and whittled him away, inch by inch. He was still massive, standing at 6’3” with his boots on (and still needing to duck under doorways, he noted with some amusement), but he captured all the details only a lover could remember. Love expanded memory, colored it—like a drop of ink inside water, it tainted everything it touched. Sometimes that was not always a bad thing. 

Jack was a bit slim when he had met him, yes. A bright-eyed, fresh recruit, young blood. Eyes that were worn but in a constant war with the darkness of the world. He had been a firefighter before joining the military, he’d said. Valor and courage had run through his blood long before they’d met. 

Now, he could not say the same—Jack was unreadable, like a second language he’d neglected for years. They’ve both changed. 

There was a long pause before Jack finally replied: “As many as it takes.”

Not wanting to dampen the mood so much, Gabriel added, “Maybe I’ll get one of those maps that you can stick pins into.”

Jack laughed humorlessly. “Yeah. It can be the honeymoon we’ve always dreamed of—one of blood and gunpowder.“

“But they’ll be memorable. Also, if you find some gunpowder, please let me know. I have some dealers who are interested in  _ antiquated _ firearms.” Gabriel tapped his claws along the windowsill.

Jack looked away and rolled his eyes in that way that could only mean he was amused. “I have several bullets with specific names on them. I can’t divulge my sources.”

“And you’ve always called  _ me _ dramatic.” 

Jack grinned, cheeky. “You’re archaic in your expressions of love, I’m archaic in my execution methods.”

“So romantic.” Gabriel sighed dramatically. “Can’t you spare any for a hapless criminal who has strayed too far from the light?” 

“Write me another poem,” Jack said back as Gabriel descended the stairs, “and I’ll consider.” 

With the room now empty, Jack turned back to it, taking it in one last time. Some parts of it were uninterrupted, a snapshot of the past—the covers were still unfolded, tossed carelessly, and the coffee mugs still had brown rings at the bottom. The closet door was ajar, disturbed by his reckless hands, in search of an outfit to throw on before he left for the airport that morning.

A day, like any other. 

Something caught his eye. It was the white twinkle of broken glass, glittering, cracking when he stepped over it. Their wedding picture. One of the last untouched memories he had of Gabriel—before Blackwatch, before the world descended into chaos. It was that moment, the happiest day of his life, preserved in one little four by six. 

Ash touched the edges. But otherwise, it was pristine. 

“Don’t forget to turn out the lights,” Gabriel called from the hole in the ceiling downstairs. 

Jack, tucking the poems in his jacket pocket for safekeeping, just laughed. 


End file.
